I apologise to hon. Members, because I have only just bobbed to catch your eye, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I know that some Members have been bobbing for some time.
I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) for the huge amount of work that he has done on this Bill. His office is next door to mine, so I know how much time he has spent beavering away on this. The Bill is vital for the safety of people using taxis. As my hon. Friend has said, the majority of taxi drivers are excellent citizens who do a fantastic job and provide a hugely valuable service to their communities, but we know that a very small number of bad eggs use that mobility to get up to things that we do not want people to get up to. It concerns me that people can register in the west midlands but then provide services a very long way away. There may be legitimate reasons for that, but it does pose some questions.
Taxi drivers are absolutely vital for our communities. In constituencies such as mine, for example, those who do not have a car might decide to spend a little money once a week to get to the supermarket, so that they do not have to carry lots of shopping bags back home on the bus. A few years ago I required treatment for an eye condition, which meant that for several months I was unable to drive and so had to rely on taxis in order to continue working—the buses did not necessarily run at the times expected for my managerial job, so I needed taxi drivers to get me where I needed to be while I could not see properly.
Quite often the people using taxis are in a vulnerable position. They might be going to hospital for treatment, or sending their children off to a special school, or their children might need to travel to different places for lessons and things like that. It is therefore vital that this legislation closes the loophole that a very small minority of taxi drivers may seek to exploit, and we know that some of them do.
As a woman, I do not like to be called vulnerable. I feel that in a scrap I can give as good as I get—you can take the girl out of Grimsby, but you can’t take Grimsby out of the girl. However, when groups of friends go out, they are always mindful that someone will be the last person to be dropped off and they will be on their own in the taxi. We forget that taxi drivers know where we live and, although we know we can trust the majority of them, people may have been on a night out, drinking alcohol. There have been terrible stories in my region, which I will not go into in detail, where people have had drinks spiked and they have been in a bad state, and friends have put them in a taxi assuming they will get home safely. On rare occasions, that has not been the case.
I thank our taxi companies. I urge people listening to the debate not just to use modern apps. Like some colleagues, I do not like using apps for such things. When I need a taxi, wherever I am in the country, I go to well known, established firms that have websites and telephone numbers, and I can talk to a person at the end of the phone line. They have the technology to know a caller’s mobile phone number and tell them the type of car they will be picked up in, the registration number and who the driver is, which gives some safety. That is something people need to think about.
We all have taxi firms in our constituencies that have served our communities for a long time, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart because they provide an excellent service. This private Member’s Bill is important and I wholeheartedly support it.
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